Tutorials, Guides, Tips, and Tricks from Everyday Experiences

This comes in handy when trying to troubleshoot a drive. If you’re met with an error message like “I/O Error: Bad sector 40003”, then you can use ‘dd’ to verify that it’s bad. For example, to write to a given sector/block, use the following command:

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdb seek=<sector_number> count=1 bs=512

To read from a given sector/block, use the following command (skip instead of seek):

dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/null skip=<sector_number> count=1 bs=512

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